only it never did them any good. They didn’t grow up until something terrible finally happened. When maturity came to them, it came through suffering: through loss, through pain, above all, through humiliation. They did something really awful—not just stupid, but unjust and hurtful—and they did it right out in the open, in front of the very person whose opinion they cared about more than anyone else’s. Emma insulted Miss Bates in the most callous fashion. Elizabeth leveled a whole series of mistaken accusations. And then someone forced them to see, in a way that they could not deny, just how very badly they had acted.
These were not easy scenes to read. They were almost as painful for me as they were for the heroines themselves. I grieved for these young women, because they were, at the moment of their humiliation, so very, very exposed. At first, all that most of them could do was burst into tears. Elizabeth was luckier. She learned the truth by letter, so at least she could be alone with her feelings. But the revelation of her many errors, when she finally did let it in, was no less crushing. She had been wrong about Jane, she had been wrong about her family, she had been wrong about everything. “Blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd”: that wasn’t just an intellectual judgment; it was a feeling that burned to the core. “How humiliating is this discovery!” she exclaimed to herself, “Yet, how just a humiliation!” And it was then, and only then, that she made her climactic discovery: “Till this moment I never knew myself.”
In drama, this is known as the moment of recognition. Oedipus discovers his horrible crime. King Lear understands how terribly he has wronged his youngest daughter. Fortunately, the errors that Elizabeth made were neither so dire nor so final.
None of us, I knew, would ever wish this on ourselves, let alone on our children. But if we are lucky, Austen was telling me, it will happen nonetheless. Because my father was wrong: you can’t learn from other people’s mistakes; you can only learn from your own. Austen was making her beloved Elizabeth miserable because she knew that that’s what growing up requires. For it is never enough to know that you have done wrong: you also have to feel it.
If there was ever a time that I felt it, it was that very summer. The truth is that Elizabeth Bennet was not the only woman I was in love with then. I was also in the throes of a gigantic crush on a woman I had met that spring. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-one—the ages, come to think of it, of a hero and heroine in a Jane Austen novel. She was just graduating from college, and my feelings for her were an agonized confusion of desire and protectiveness. She was lovely and gentle and smart, with a slow smile that seemed to light up from within and an ironic sense of humor that came out with a raucous laugh. Our friendship flared up fast and bright. Here was someone, I saw, who could be a true companion.
My life got very simple that summer. My exams and her were the only things in it. Sharpening my brain against those hundred books, and wringing my heart for the want of her. The two ran together. She became my muse, my goal, the face that I saw when I looked through the page. Spending time in her company was the one exception I made to my rule of monastic seclusion. We would walk around the city, talking for hours about art and ideas and all the people we knew. We went to museums, we went to the theater, we would joke and compare notes and trade observations.
But none of it was any good. Because reliably, pretty much every time we got together, I would manage to say something idiotic and hurtful: pretentious or sexist or condescending. “Notice the way Matisse plays with color” (as if I were some kind of audio guide), or, “You should really read some more Freud” (though she’d probably read more than I had), or, “You’ll understand these things when you get to be my age” (my age! all of twenty-eight!). It was a kind of compulsion. Reading
And in fact, she never did. She was my friend, but she never became my girlfriend. Yet the shame of it all, and the grief at what it had cost me, burned those lessons into my brain. She wasn’t the first person to tell me I was arrogant and condescending—far, far from it—but because she mattered so much more to me than anyone ever had, she was the first to get through.
So when, after a couple of months of this, I read
Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain. In fact, Austen provided a perfect example of the kind of young person who doesn’t accept them—Lydia Bennet, Elizabeth’s youngest sister—and what can happen as a result. Because Lydia was exactly like her mother—it was all too easy to imagine the empty-headed flirt that Mrs. Bennet must once have been—she had always been overindulged: never criticized, never restrained, coddled and fussed over no matter what she did. It was a classic case of overidentification: the mother eager to hold on to the last remnants of her youth by reliving it through her youngest daughter, the daughter only too happy to comply.
By the time she turned fifteen, Lydia was completely unmanageable. Always loud, always laughing, always flirting, never taking anything seriously—never taking her own life seriously. She was an embarrassment, and when she finally did something truly disgraceful, she became more than an embarrassment; she became a scandal. Yet there she was at the end of the novel, still laughing, still perfectly pleased with herself. “I am sure my sisters must all envy me,” she somehow managed to say, though her sisters probably wanted to drown her in a lake. “I only hope they may have half my good luck.” No matter how much pain she caused her family, Lydia was never going to feel the slightest bit of discomfort herself.
No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we’ve done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it. Even after her disgrace, Lydia seemed to have “the happiest memories in the world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain.” Why was she able to have so clear a conscience about the things she’d done? Because she just pretended that they never happened. Nor was she the only one; the Bennets’ whole social circle was no better. After they discovered the awful truth about a young gentleman with whom they had all been delighted, “every body declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and every body began to find out, that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.” It takes courage, Austen was telling us, to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them.
How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation, for her, is a gift that keeps on giving. “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure,” Elizabeth remarked at the end of the novel, but as usual, she was being ironic. In fact, she said it to the very person who she knew would keep her honest by continuing to point out her mistakes and remind her of what she had done.
Elizabeth had come to understand, at last, what growing up means, and she had also come to recognize that if you do it right, it never stops. Not only wasn’t I born perfect, in other words, I was never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult was not going to give me the right to become complacent. Again, Austen offered a perfect example of what not to do. Elizabeth’s father was a good man who had allowed his character to go to seed
